After a month with the iPod Touch I want to touch my desktop screen, my laptop screen and even the glass on the scanner. This touchy-feely aberration makes reaching for the mouse seem obsolete. Even before the iPad is available in the USA, let alone poor cousin Australia, I’m already asking when my work software will have this innovation.
I am already feeling an inclination to touch my monitor rather than reach for the mouse. With text, paragraphs move around the screen effortlessly. In music software, I push and point chord symbols, copy tracks. Using the thumb and finger technique of expanding, I open a track, edit notes, return to the score. I am a genius.
I sense that the ubiquitous mouse is on the endangered species, and as a mouse induced RSI sufferer I can think of no rodent more deserving of eradication.
Finger touch won’t be available everywhere however. I realise that rubbing a finger across my car window won’t open or close it. That it’s a 1985 Ford possibly has something to do with this. Similarly forgetting my keys to the office in the morning won’t be rectified by a quick swipe across the glass of the front door.
Perhaps we are still a long way from open sesame, but with the right fingertouch or swipe who knows where you’ll be able to go in the future.
Categories: champions
Tagged: ipad, Mac, OSX
Will I love the iPad? I think so. Not because I’m a gadget freak, or an Apple sycophant, well I am that. Apple could market a blunt stick and I’d seriously take a look at it. But a 9 inch iPod Touch, an overgrown iPhone without the phone? Now that’s overblown.
But is it? I have hands-on experience with this technology, thanks to nextbyte and their give-away promotion of an ipod Touch with every Mac purchased.
It’s an ipod that looks like an iphone, it even works a bit like an iphone if you are in Maccas or Gloria Jeans, but anywhere else it’s a slick looking ipod with some useless apps. Well not quite useless, to my (searching quickly on my ipod dictionary for an antonym of) chagrin.
It’s got funny little apps that allow you to tabulate your expenses while actually out and about. (as well as email, internet and e-books). PDAs, I know, could do this years ago, but this is fun, especially when you get home and this cute device synchs right up close and personal to your desktop.
Calendars, to-dos, Quicken finance data, all migrate effortlessly to the big motherboard on your desk, thus keeping your accountant happy, your inner nerd satisfied and your natural inclination to assume the couch potato position as soon as you walk in the door unfettered.
Obviously I could take the next step and upgrade to an iphone, but given that I never answer my phone this would seem extravagant. As the soldier who approached a WAAC back in WW2, only to be told that it meant ‘a walk and a cuddle’, said, ‘I think I’ll wait for a WAAF’, I think I’ll wait for an iPad.
Categories: champions
Tagged: ipad, ipod touch, WAAC, WAAF
